Illustrating the Past in Early Modern England

The Representation of History in Printed Books

James A. Knapp

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351928908
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Illustrating the Past is a study of the status of visual and verbal media in early modern English representations of the past. It focuses on general attitudes towards visual and verbal representations of history as well as specific illustrated books produced during the period. Through a close examination of the relationship of image to text in light of contemporary discussions of poetic and aesthetic practice, the book demonstrates that the struggle between the image and the word played a profoundly important role in England's emergent historical self-awareness. The opposition between history and story, fact and fiction, often tenuous, provided a sounding board for deeper conflicts over the form in which representations might best yield truth from history. The ensuing schism between poets and historians over the proper venue for the lessons of the past manifested itself on the pages of early modern printed books. The discussion focuses on the word and image relationships in several important illustrated books printed during the second half of the sixteenth century-including Holinshed's Chronicles (1577) and Foxe's Book of Martyrs (1563, 1570)-in the context of contemporary works on history and poetics, such as Sir Philip Sidney's Apology for Poetry and Thomas Blundeville's The true order and Method of wryting and reading Hystories. Illustrating the Past specifically answers two important questions concerning the resultant production of literary and historical texts in the period: Why did the use of images in printed histories suddenly become unpopular at the end of the sixteenth century? and What impact did this publishing trend have on writers of literary and historical texts?

1
Introduction: Historical Afterimages and History After Images

You could imagine the illustration

appearing in several places in a book, a text-book for instance. In the relevant text something different is in question every time: here a glass cube, there an inverted open box, there a wire frame of that shape, there three boards forming a solid angle. Each time the text supplies the interpretation of the illustration.

But we can also see the illustration now as one thing now as another.

—So we interpret it, and see it as we interpret it.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

After-Image: the impression retained by the retina of the eye, or by any other organ of sense, of a vivid sensation, after the external cause has been removed. Also transf.

—OED

There have been times that the question “What is an Image?” has been a matter of some urgency.

—W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology

This is a book about books. In particular, it is a book about the decision to represent history through both picture and text in certain books printed in England during the reign of Elizabeth I. A central premise in what follows is that transformations to the visual field of the printed page in early modern England—available in the existing print record—tell a story about cultural change at a particularly turbulent moment in English history. Throughout the study, I argue that the pages of the early modern books discussed constitute afterimages, in which we can catch sight of a variety of early modern English ways of seeing, understanding, and representing. By figuring the material traces of early modern visuality as afterimages, it is possible to emphasize what is lost to historical inquiry without denying the way in which the present is haunted by its memory of the past. Because material artifacts seem to ground our inquiry at the same time that they demand our interpretations, the temptation to imagine the historical endeavor as one of voyeuristic reconstruction—of the challenge to explain the inarticulate presence of the past—is often overpowering. As afterimages, rather than mute representations, the material traces of the past become ghosts, often glimpsed, but without solidity, their presence as revealing of contemporary concerns as past truths.

The particular story I tell is about the disappearance of visual illustrations from the representation of history in English printed books and its consequences regarding the early modern English conception of the past. My subject, then, is the story of English literary and historical writing’s transition to an era after images. For in a relatively short period, spanning the years between the accession of Elizabeth I and the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the character of English printed histories underwent a profound transformation. In the 1560s and 70s English presses turned out copiously and often elegantly illustrated books on historical subjects, influenced by the explosion of graphic production on the Continent, but uniquely English in character. These books became the standard sources of information about England’s past, and they were consulted regularly by writers with a wide range of interests (jurists, poets, courtiers, and reformers among them). During these same decades, English literary production was limited.¹ By the mid- to late-1580s the production of newly illustrated histories ceased almost entirely, while printed histories continued to appear with regularity. The timing is intriguing as the 1580s are generally considered the first decade of the English literary Renaissance, inaugurated by the publication of Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579), incidentally the last work Spenser published with illustrations.² Though cut short, an English tradition of narrative illustration had begun to emerge alongside the increased production of textual histories issued from English presses beginning roughly with the publication of Halle’s Union (1548).³ The initial decision of printers to include illustrations, and the complexity of the text-image relations that were the result, suggests a more continuous transition from the tradition of medieval manuscript illumination (and the medieval cultural imagination) to that of the printed illustrated book (and the post-Reformation culture of the word) than has been generally acknowledged. The ultimate break with the newly established practice of woodcut book illustration indicates that the resonance of the earlier tradition waned as the seventeenth century approached, signaling a shift in the representation and conception of the past in the last quarter of the sixteenth century.

This change in English historical representation has not yet attracted much attention, in part because the histories of the period have been disseminated largely through reprint editions issued after the idea of the book congealed around what Michel de Certeau calls the “blank” space of the page.⁴ A space of single and authoritative authorship, the blank space of the page is a familiar image in the imagined confrontation between the writing subject and the act of creation. And yet, it seems increasingly probable that no such thing existed in the period with which this study is concerned. As Evelyn Tribble has shown, the early modern page was a battleground marked by competing voices, each position granted representation in the often overloaded margins.⁵ Shakespearean editorial scholarship has taken the lead in demonstrating the collaborative nature of early modern authorship, convincingly portraying the early modern playtext as a corporately authored social product modified continually by the intersection of the economies of the stage and those of print.⁶ And Adrian Johns has argued persuasively that the very idea of textual authority was continually constructed and deconstructed on the pages of printed books and in the communities in which those books were encountered.⁷

Produced after the codification of textual authority through normative legal and social pressures (a process stretching through to the nineteenth century), reprint editions generally claim to represent their texts free from historically contingent and superfluous materiality, features—including size, binding, marginalia, ornaments and illustrations—that do not easily conform to idealized notions of text.⁸ Of the notable examples discussed in the present study, Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles and John Foxe’s “Book of Martrys” are only the most dramatic examples of how the editorial purification of early modern illustrated books has skewed critical accounts of the historical imagination in early modern England. These two texts, long considered crucial to any understanding of early modern English thought, have never been reproduced with the illustrations, though both have seen nineteenth and twentieth century reprints.⁹ Despite an increased awareness of the impact of editorial intervention—one that continues to grow—most contemporary knowledge of these texts is based on the later editions, stripped of the images that (we are told) injudicious printers inserted to pad their pockets in the formative years of print culture.¹⁰ With the exception of the occasional, expensive facsimile edition, early modern English printed images are seldom reproduced along with the texts they once inhabited. Textual purification—or more precisely, the tendency to treat images and text in isolation—appeared early in the history of textual theory, and it has been a staple of editorial practice from its inception.¹¹ The noble editorial hope to produce the most “accurate” text often had the result of what is perhaps best figured as sublation, in the Hegelian sense—aufheben—of simultaneous preservation and destruction: it has ensured the influence of a wide range of texts on our understanding of early modern culture at the same time that it has obscured from view the many forms in which those texts were conveyed. Put in slightly different terms, the editorial history of some of the most important sixteenth-century illustrated books has been profoundly affected by a cultural turn, roughly beginning at the end of the sixteenth century, away from images, an era, if you will, after images.

The notion of the afterimage captures one final problematic that continually attends the study of the past and its images (both visual and verbal): that all of history’s images come after the events they seek to capture. As Paul Ricoeur puts it:

History begins when we no longer have immediate understanding, and when we undertake to reconstruct the sequence of antecedents along lines other than that of the motives and reasons alleged by the actors in the history. The difficulty for epistemology is precisely to show how explanation is added to, or superimposed on, or even substituted for, the immediate understanding of the course of the past history.¹²

To make explicit the recognition that any historical account offers, retrospectively, a superimposed or substituted form of explanation in lieu of immediate understanding is to shift (only slightly) the focus of historical inquiry from historical events to the history of their representation. Without the hope of getting at the past, at least we might get at the variety of ways in which the past has been represented, for we have a record of the record. The deeper problem, as Ricoeur notes, is in understanding the manner in which the superimposition of explanation is carried out in historical representation, an epistemological difficulty compounded by the fact that the accepted account shifts over time. The present study addresses Ricoeur’s epistemological difficulty by beginning from the premise that what we see when we look at the pages of early modern books is not the same as what was seen by the first generation of those book’s readers—that the epistemological basis for interpretation has shifted with the passage of time. This is not to argue that the artifacts of print culture are not the material things witnessed by early modern observers, but that the acts of seeing and reading, like that of interpreting, are themselves caught in history. Early modern reading and seeing were constrained by different habits and assumptions, and radically different visual and verbal contexts.¹³

The peculiar quality of the “rare” book in the twenty-first century is a feature of its lack of familiarity, a feature, in other words, of its historical alterity. But of course this quality would have been imperceptible to the early modern viewer/reader. The gain in looking at something that is removed from the history it purports to convey derives less from some inaccessible historical authenticity (whether or not the artifact is real) than from our understanding of the ways in which such material interlopers enable an articulation of the present sense of the past. As afterimages of sixteenth-century England, superimposed upon the visual field of the historical observer in the twenty-first century, the pages of the books that comprise this study pull in two directions—toward an unrecoverable, ghostlike, and intriguing past and toward an equally unknown future. Mapping the hypothetical past onto the myriad of potential futures is as close as we can come to doing justice to history.

The key, as Ricoeur points out, is to make clear why some attempts at mapping ought to be considered more compelling, more just, than others. This task has been at the heart of Hayden White’s work, which has always begun from a basic assumption about history: “the undeniable historical fact that distinctively historical discourses typically produce narrative interpretations of their subject matter.”¹⁴ Accepting White’s premise that the mediation of the historical event—rather than its reality—is the crucial feature of historical inquiry, the present study extends the possibility that the typical tendency to produce “narrative interpretations,” rather than, say, imagistic interpretations, is a feature of the modern era, which was not dominant in sixteenth-century England, and which may lose its dominance again in the not too distant future.¹⁵ It is hard to contest that the representation of history has been dominated since (at least) the eighteenth century by a variety of linguistic features associated with narrative genre and poetic form.¹⁶ The variety of attempts to render historiography more scientific—from Herder and Droysen to Ranke and Hemple—can be seen as unsuccessful attempts to sever this relationship. But at the opening of a new millennium, it appears that an emergent emphasis on the visual may soon displace the former hegemony of verbal, print based, narrative forms in the realm of cultural production, creating the possibility of non-narrative, non-linguistic interactions with and representations of the past.¹⁷ In our efforts to come to terms with this cultural shift, it is helpful to recognize that the era of narrativity coincided with the era of the book, and for this reason the recent turn to the history of the book is crucial. Moreover, it is no coincidence that the rise of interest in the history of the book has coincided with late twentieth-century developments in information technologies, described by Roger Chartier as central to “the profound transformation that is currently altering all modes of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: Historical Afterimages and History After Images
• 2 Printing Books “with the pyctures”: The Context for Illustration in Sixteenth-Century England
• 3 Transforming Truth: Hilliard, Sidney, and the Emergence of an Anti-Materialist Aesthetic
• 4 Stories and Icons: Reorienting the Visual in John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments
• 5 From “universal cosmography” to Narrative History: The Evolution of Holinshed’s Chronicles
• 6 Vision into Verse: John Derricke’s Image of Ireland and the Decline of Visual History
• 7 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index